Taiwan's opposition-controlled parliament has approved the government's annual budget, preserving funding for a drone programme central to the island's defence plans against China. Lawmakers passed the $93bn budget late on Friday, after a record 266 days of political deadlock and its legal deadline, as President William Lai Ching-te's administration, which lost its parliamentary majority in 2024, continues to clash with opposition parties over government spending. The Kuomintang dropped the proposed cut after concluding there was no wasteful overlap between the development and procurement programmes it had initially cited as justification. Other reductions included a 60 percent cut to special allowances for government agency heads, a 2.5 percent cut to military equipment and facilities spending, and a 50 percent cut to media policy and publicity budgets. Before Friday's vote, the government had been operating under a provisional budget mechanism to keep paying civil servants and funding welfare programmes.

Trump's new world order has become real and Europe is having to adjust fast Downtown Munich is best-known for chic shops and flashy fast cars but right now its streets are bedecked with posters advertising next generation drones. Europe's security under construction boasts the slogan on an eye-catching set of sleek black-and-white photographs, festooned across a scaffolding-clad church on one of this town's best known pedestrian boulevards. Such an unapologetic public display of military muscle would have been unimaginable here just a few years ago, but the world outside Germany is changing fast, and taking this country with it. The southern region of Bavaria has become Germany's leading defence technology hub, focusing on AI, drones and aerospace. People here, like most other Europeans, say they feel increasingly exposed - squeezed between an expansionist Russia and an economically aggressive China to the east, and an increasingly unpredictable, former best pal, the United States, to the west.

Taiwan's parliament has passed an extra spending bill of $8.6bn, in the latest bid to boost defence capabilities against growing military threats from China. Lawmakers on Tuesday agreed unanimously to pass the special budget, which comes on top of a record annual defence budget of about $17bn set for 2022. The additional resources are aimed at acquiring precision missiles and mass-manufacture high-efficiency naval ships "in the shortest period of time" to boost the island's sea and air capabilities, the government said. The budget includes a coastal anti-ship missiles system, a locally developed Wan Chien (Ten Thousand Swords) cruise missile as well as an attack drone system and installation of combat systems on coastguard ships. Democratic Taiwan lives under constant threat of an invasion by authoritarian China, which claims the self-ruled island as part of its territory.